I realize this is off-topic, but this smacks of one of the problems I used to have with WMP:
While playing a cd using windows media player and doing practically ANYTHING ELSE at the same time with my computer, the cd playback skips.
Why is this? There is a wire that goes from my cd drive directly to my sound card. Isn't that wire supposed to make cd playback easier and require almost no system resources?
Anyway, this hasn't been a problem ever since I stopped using WMP.
These are specifically about the webcasting royalties and SoundExchange (an RIAA creation), so I may be off-base in assuming that other royalties (for commercial applications such as songs played in restaurants or on the radio) are collected in the same way.
Basically, SoundExchange collects royalties for everyone, members and non-members alike. It pays their members the royalties that they collect on their behalf and holds royalties collected for non-members in escrow (until those non-members pay their membership fees and become members. Extortion? naaahhh...).
I remember a long, long time ago when I was working in a restaurant and the BMG representative showed up to give the owner a bill for the music we'd been playing. The restaurant was a small coffee cafe and the music system was a home stereo with a cd jukebox populated by cds that employees had brought from home. I remember at the time having difficulty understanding why the restaurant owner had to pay a big bill (around $600 for a year?) for music that was already paid for. I also learned at that time that it's illegal (in the state of Washington, anyway) for a public place of business to play the radio. Something about how the license to play the music that the radio station buys does not allow for use of that music in a commercial setting, like a restaurant. It was at that time that the punk rock dishwasher declared that as soon as his band was able to get their cd out (this was a long time ago), they'd only play their music for free and fuck BMG. That idealist sentiment now seems impossible in today's music rights legal environment.
The very last sentence in the quote, a quote from the woman who did the research, hypothesized that the reason for the association between night-shift workers and cancer was that they were exposed to light at night. It doesn't imply that the reason is 'not going out in daylight', though that is an excellent common sense deduction.
The way I took this was that if your skin is exposed to (artificial) light at night, it will be less able to create melatonin during the day, even if exposed to normal amounts of sunlight. Something like getting inured to light or building up a resistance to it, which would then hamper melatonin production.
The fear then, for me, as a read-myself-to-sleep kind of guy, is that I could increase my risk of cancer just by forgetting to turn out the light before sleeping.
ok, I wasn't very afraid, but I couldn't help but comment on yet another thing to shun when trying to avoid the big C.
The twenty-four-hour day/night cycle, which is also known as the circadian clock, influences physiological processes in virtually all living things. Pervasive artificial illumination has existed for such a brief period that not even the species that invented it has had time to adapt, biologically or otherwise. The most widely discussed human malady related to the disturbance of circadian rhythms is jet lag, but there are others. Richard Stevens, a cancer epidemiologist at the University of Connecticut Health Center, in Farmington, has suggested a link between cancer and the "circadian disruption" of hormones caused by artificial lighting. Early in his career, Stevens was one of many researchers struck by the markedly high incidence of breast cancer among women in the industrialized world, in comparison with those in developing countries, and he at first supported the most common early hypothesis, which was that the cause must be dietary. Yet repeated studies found no clear link to food. In the early eighties, Stevens told me recently, "I literally woke up in the middle of the night--there was a street lamp outside the window, and it was so bright that I could almost read in my bedroom--and I thought, Could it be that?" A few years later, he persuaded the authors of the Nurses' Health Study, one of the largest and most rigorous investigations of women's medical issues ever undertaken, to add questions about nighttime employment, and the study subsequently revealed a strong association between working the night shift and an increased risk of breast cancer. Eva Schernhammer, of the Harvard Medical School, and Karl Schulmeister, an Austrian physicist, analyzed the work-shift data from the Nurses' Study several years ago, and wrote, "We hypothesize that the potential primary culprit for this observed association is the lack of melatonin, a cancer-protective agent whose production is severely diminished in people exposed to light at night."
I mean, if you're going to have every feature that comes on a cell phone*, why not the camera too? Especially when one of the major selling points of the iPod is the "cool" way you can look at your photo collection, it's a no brainer to want to be able to add to that collection. Right now. On-the-go.
Allowed by the WTO. I will mean that if Antigua did pirate US stuff, the US would not be able to get the WTO to apply any sanctions. Which is pretty much all they could do, as Antigua is not in the Us and it would be awfully hard to convince anyone that you need a new war just cause of some pirate DVDs.
I'm sure the MPAA is working on a draft war declaration as we speak.
You can download the war declaration now! The torrent just hit the net 3 hours ago...
My company circulates material like this on a regular basis. This is to totally bogus -- wait, six grand you say?
I bet you could get more than $6k if you just approach your company directly. Offer them your silence for about $30k. They'll save 90% on the lawsuit would cost, and everybody wins.
Take responsibility. Stand up and declare your rights.
Don't weasel out by blaming the other guy.
While I'm not sure what you mean by 'Stand up and declare your rights', I'll let it go and talk about weaseling for a second.
In this case, the defendant claims to have done nothing wrong and to be guilty only of the following:
1. owning a computer
2. having an aol account
3. allowing the computer to connect with the internet
4. not monitoring their computer to ensure it was not being used for illegal activity
Taken at face value, I don't see any weaseling going on. The only seemingly weasel-ish aspect is the way that the third party complaint spreads across so many defendants. This, however, is perfectly acceptable in the legal system if, again, you take the original defendant's testimony at face value.
The way I see it, Miss Santangelo is basically saying, "I didn't do it. It's not my fault. I don't know who is responsible, but it's probably one of these guys, let the court figure it out."
It's not that she's accusing aol and Sharman as much as she's saying that they had more to do with any infraction than she did.
Looking at how this looks for precedence, I'm interested to see how this turns out. We currently have laws that hold a bar liable if a patron gets a DUI on the way home. Bars serve alcohol, it's what they do. But they get in trouble if people use their product illegally. By the same token, aol supplies internet access. Should they be held completely harmless if people use their product illegally? If so, why is there a double standard between bars and ISPs?
As Microsoft always does, now that the NEW version is out, they have suddenly become aware and willing to talk openly about how miserable a failure the OLD version was. This is Vista marketing at its finest. And in the fine tradition of Microsoft Marketing, it's a FUD attack against the product with the largest market share, in this case WinXP. Never mind that the product in question is put out by the same company.
The concept of implementing half-baked concepts into retail products isn't exactly new, although it is becoming more prevalent every day. (Think Windows 3.0)
Think Windows 1.0, 2.0x, and 2.1 while you're at it.
I was thinking about how MS might want to work a similar deal to allow people to use their Zunes on airplanes, but then I realized that the airlines might not want people running wireless devices of any kind on an airplane.
It seems like this is a huge win for Apple, as the iPod has no embedded wireless features that might screw with the plane's electronics.
Does anyone know if people will even be allowed to use Zunes on airplanes? Or is there a setting to turn off the wireless capabilities while on airplanes? And will people actually find and use that setting?
Slashdot Mirror
While playing a cd using windows media player and doing practically ANYTHING ELSE at the same time with my computer, the cd playback skips.
Why is this? There is a wire that goes from my cd drive directly to my sound card. Isn't that wire supposed to make cd playback easier and require almost no system resources?
Anyway, this hasn't been a problem ever since I stopped using WMP.
But that has nothing to do with my point: that the RIAA collects royalties for non-members as well as members.
I did some googling on this to try to find where I'd read about it and found the following two articles:
These are specifically about the webcasting royalties and SoundExchange (an RIAA creation), so I may be off-base in assuming that other royalties (for commercial applications such as songs played in restaurants or on the radio) are collected in the same way.
Basically, SoundExchange collects royalties for everyone, members and non-members alike. It pays their members the royalties that they collect on their behalf and holds royalties collected for non-members in escrow (until those non-members pay their membership fees and become members. Extortion? naaahhh...).
I remember a long, long time ago when I was working in a restaurant and the BMG representative showed up to give the owner a bill for the music we'd been playing. The restaurant was a small coffee cafe and the music system was a home stereo with a cd jukebox populated by cds that employees had brought from home. I remember at the time having difficulty understanding why the restaurant owner had to pay a big bill (around $600 for a year?) for music that was already paid for. I also learned at that time that it's illegal (in the state of Washington, anyway) for a public place of business to play the radio. Something about how the license to play the music that the radio station buys does not allow for use of that music in a commercial setting, like a restaurant. It was at that time that the punk rock dishwasher declared that as soon as his band was able to get their cd out (this was a long time ago), they'd only play their music for free and fuck BMG. That idealist sentiment now seems impossible in today's music rights legal environment.
Am I missing something? Or are you forgetting that CDs ARE digital music?
who would that be?
It's my understanding that the RIAA represents ALL recording artists, whether said artist wants to be represented or not.
-- Insert Obligatory Beowulf Cluster Comment here. --
The way I took this was that if your skin is exposed to (artificial) light at night, it will be less able to create melatonin during the day, even if exposed to normal amounts of sunlight. Something like getting inured to light or building up a resistance to it, which would then hamper melatonin production.
The fear then, for me, as a read-myself-to-sleep kind of guy, is that I could increase my risk of cancer just by forgetting to turn out the light before sleeping.
ok, I wasn't very afraid, but I couldn't help but comment on yet another thing to shun when trying to avoid the big C.
It would be nice to get a rebate on games where you aren't using all the features.
I wonder how many people would play WoW with the graphics dialed down to Atari 2600 quality...
What do you mean, I can run the sails but not the guns??
That, IMHO, is vastly different from paying 10 cents for a purple pirate hat that has no practical purpose other than to look cool.
From the article:
Sorry, iPod doesn't do Java...
I mean, if you're going to have every feature that comes on a cell phone*, why not the camera too? Especially when one of the major selling points of the iPod is the "cool" way you can look at your photo collection, it's a no brainer to want to be able to add to that collection. Right now. On-the-go.
Thanks.
*except microphone
I thought it would be SunLite.
And if someone tried to do an end-around on that, you could hit them with a DMCA lawsuit.
And just for the record, I OWN 2007-08-31 16:20:23 UTC. ...and I'll sue you if you try to use it.
I'm waiting for Busty Bunny...
When did we devolve to this level of inanery?
Maybe I'm stuck in dreams of a past utopia that never was, but in any case, I feel old and slightly soiled now.
While I'm not sure what you mean by 'Stand up and declare your rights', I'll let it go and talk about weaseling for a second.
In this case, the defendant claims to have done nothing wrong and to be guilty only of the following:
Taken at face value, I don't see any weaseling going on. The only seemingly weasel-ish aspect is the way that the third party complaint spreads across so many defendants. This, however, is perfectly acceptable in the legal system if, again, you take the original defendant's testimony at face value.
The way I see it, Miss Santangelo is basically saying, "I didn't do it. It's not my fault. I don't know who is responsible, but it's probably one of these guys, let the court figure it out."
It's not that she's accusing aol and Sharman as much as she's saying that they had more to do with any infraction than she did.
Looking at how this looks for precedence, I'm interested to see how this turns out. We currently have laws that hold a bar liable if a patron gets a DUI on the way home. Bars serve alcohol, it's what they do. But they get in trouble if people use their product illegally. By the same token, aol supplies internet access. Should they be held completely harmless if people use their product illegally? If so, why is there a double standard between bars and ISPs?
Think Windows 1.0, 2.0x, and 2.1 while you're at it.
I was thinking about how MS might want to work a similar deal to allow people to use their Zunes on airplanes, but then I realized that the airlines might not want people running wireless devices of any kind on an airplane.
It seems like this is a huge win for Apple, as the iPod has no embedded wireless features that might screw with the plane's electronics.
Does anyone know if people will even be allowed to use Zunes on airplanes? Or is there a setting to turn off the wireless capabilities while on airplanes? And will people actually find and use that setting?